So these 'airstrikes against ISIS' were only a guise for them to go into Iraq and bomb PKK positions, who themselves are involved in fighting ISIS 
Should have expected as much.
Should have expected as much.
Turkey
- Thread starter Neutral
- Start date
Not at all, I'd say you'd be OK. Obviously things could change in the Kurdish regions though. As far as I know even during the height of that conflict in the 80s and 90s you could travel relatively freely in the east, although there were loads of military checkpoints stretching from Gaziantep to Hakkari.
I'm in Istanbul today and it's business as usual.
Just got back from Turkey today (Istanbul and Trabzon). Istanbul is a fantastic place. Absolutely sweetheart bunch of folks, at least the ones I ran into. Trabzon was noticeably less friendly and more conservative. Got the typical scared looks from mothers with their kids, but in the end, almost everyone was very nice.
Reading another history of Turkey. They've got a tale to tell.
You reckon they'll make it into the EU, or even still want in by the time it's offered?
Reading another history of Turkey. They've got a tale to tell.
You reckon they'll make it into the EU, or even still want in by the time it's offered?
It's one of the many issues which divides the country. Kemalist Turks will always be interested in joining for ideological reasons, whereas the Islamist current represented by the AKP would only be interested for reasons of utility. For what it's worth, I think from the EU's perspective, the ship has sailed.
What book you reading out of interest?
"Turkey - A Short History", and "Everything You Need to Know About Turkey". Both short, and the latter is only partly focused on history. I read a much ore thorough one some time ago, but don't recall the name, and needed a refresher regardless. If you've got any recommendations, I'd be happy to hear them.
Am planning on spending a month or 2 working there back there come spring. Probably set up shop in Beyoglu. Didn't really get to explore the Asian part much though. Any suggestions?
Fascinating place. Wonderful folks.
Am planning on spending a month or 2 working there back there come spring. Probably set up shop in Beyoglu. Didn't really get to explore the Asian part much though. Any suggestions?
Fascinating place. Wonderful folks.
Only been over that side once apart from catching the train from Haydarpasha station. There are some good places to eat in the streets behind the Karakoy landing dock, apart from that I don't know much about it.
Couple of good reads would be Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul (his memoirs of growing up in the city) and Bruce Clark's Twice A Stranger (about the 'population exchange' of Turks and Greeks after WW1). If you want to get really deep into Ottoman history, I'd recommend Between Two Worlds by Cemal Kafadar and especially The Emergence of Modern Turkey by Bernard Lewis, one of the best books ever written on any Middle Eastern topic.
Osman's Dream - Caroline Finkel?
Haven't read it I'm afraid, I think it's one of the only books in English which treats the entire story of the empire from start to finish (i.e. 1300 - 1922/23). I'm sure it's excellent, her husband is one of the best journalists reporting on Turkey these days.
It is excellent, thought you didn't mention it as you didn't like it and wanted your opinion on it.
Thanks. I like Pamuk and would give that one a read. I only just realized he got into trouble with the government there a while back.
I don't know about Lewis honestly though. I've been quite leery of his writing after years ago reading a bunch of similarly themed works including 2 of his, "What Went Wrong" and "The Crisis of Islam" a long time ago. He's clearly intelligent, but he seems to have a particular point of view he's looking to drive. Given the title of those 2, it seems likely, and perhaps his other books are less opinionated.
Anyway, thanks for the tips (you too Uzz). I'll try to get those read before I get back there. Living over in Wales now, so chasing down some good Welsh history books first. I always do that... I should get my head out and get these things read before I show up somewhere.
Lewis is obviously a controversial guy, and he's basically been repeating himself since the late 70s in one form or another, those two books you mention being perfect examples. His early work is genuinely brilliant though. The book on Turkey was published in the early 60s at his height, he was the first Western scholar to get access to the Ottoman archives. Obviously more recent work has expanded on it, but it remains a classic, and Lewis writes so well whether you agree with him or not.
They should bring back Ufuk Uras. He got a bum deal.
Big escalation in the conflict with the PKK this week, dozens killed on both sides, anti-Kurdish rioting in some Turkish cities.
Is Turkey heading toward civil war?
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ori...pkk-clashes-heading-to-turk-kurd-strife.html#
The fierce conflict between the Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the 1990s claimed some 40,000 lives, but it never devolved into a Turkish-Kurdish civil war. Although a number of bloody incidents took place in residential areas of western Turkey where Kurdish minorities lived, they were quickly contained before they could spread.
The first sign that real Turkish-Kurdish strife is possible came in October 2014, during the deadly street protests referred to as the “Kobani unrest.” During Oct. 6-8, Kurds across Turkey took to the streets to protest the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which they held responsible for the siege of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani by the Islamic State (IS). In ethnically mixed, Turkish-majority cities, such as Gaziantep, Turkish crowds confronted the demonstrators. In fact, clashes in Gaziantep claimed four lives. Deaths from the unrest, which spilled over to 35 cities, totaled 50, and thousands of public and residential buildings, businesses, schools and vehicles were vandalized or destroyed.
Since Sept. 8, Turkey has been the scene of nationwide attacks on Kurds that are unprecedented since the PKK took up arms in 1984. The wave of violence erupted after two massive PKK bomb attacks killed 16 soldiers and 14 policemen on Sept. 6 and Sept. 8, respectively, spreading to almost all the provinces outside the Kurdish-majority regions of the southeast. Nationalist groups took to the streets, assaulting Kurdish civilians, Kurdish-owned businesses and offices of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which had emerged as Turkey’s third-largest party in the June 7 elections, winning 13.1% of the vote and 80 seats in the 550-member parliament. The party’s offices in 56 provinces and districts were stoned, vandalized and torched. The attacks reached a peak late Sept. 8 when a mob of some 500 people stormed HDP headquarters in downtown Ankara, ransacking and burning part of the building.
Turkish nationalists, reported to have mobilized via social media, also attacked intercity buses carrying passengers to Kurdish-majority regions. Dozens of buses, singled out according to their license plates or company names, had their windows broken under hails of stones, while others were stopped and their passengers verbally and physically harassed. As a result, bus companies operating between the western regions and Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, canceled services Sept. 9-10 to protest the violence.
Impoverished Kurdish workers struggling to make a living from seasonal agricultural jobs across the country were not spared beatings and harassment. Meanwhile, one of the worst nights of horror unfolded Sept. 8 in the central Anatolian city of Kirsehir, where more than 20 Kurdish-owned businesses and shops, including the city’s only bookstore, were torched. The local HDP office was vandalized, and vehicles bound for the southeast were stoned at the city’s bus terminal. According to witnesses, the assailants, who numbered in the thousands, carried lists of their targets. Kirsehir Gov. Necati Senturk blamed the violence on “provocateurs who mingled into an innocent demonstration to condemn terrorism.”
Indeed, the popular outrage the PKK has triggered by killing 30 members of the security forces in two days has presented provocateurs with a golden opportunity. Luckily, as of Sept. 10, the attacks on businesses and party offices had not resulted in any fatalities, but no doubt this good fortune cannot last forever. The danger of frenzied, gun-wielding Turks and Kurds confronting each other in the streets is very real, as the Kobani protests have already shown.
That said, the risk of an all-out confrontation appears for now to have been averted. HDP parliamentary whip Idris Baluken issued a poignant warning Sept. 9, stressing that simultaneous, organized attacks in dozens of cities cannot be explained as a coincidence. “We are hardly restraining our own base,” he said. “Everyone should well foresee the consequences if the masses confront each other.” Turkey’s Kurds are estimated to number at least 15 million, with half of them living in the country’s predominantly Turkish west. This alone offers a good idea of how bloody an ethnic conflict could be.
HDP offices and election bureaus had been targets of violence in the run-up to the June 7 polls, including the site of two bomb attacks. The HDP and the Kurdish movement in general showed restraint and stayed out of the streets. They maintained such discipline even after a bomb ripped through an HDP rally in Diyarbakir on June 5, killing four people and wounding 50. Kurdish street unrest at the time would have jeopardized the party’s chances of reaching the 10% threshold of votes required to enter parliament.
The HDP again faces the same risk if Kurds respond to provocations and take to the streets, contributing to a climate of all-out conflict ahead of the Nov. 1 snap elections. Failure by the HDP to surpass the vote threshold will very likely mean the AKP’s return to power as a single-party government.
The job of the provocateurs, meanwhile, has become much easier than in the run-up to June 7. The war with the PKK has resumed, triggering a contest for the nationalist vote between the AKP and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which translates into enmity against Kurds in the street. It is no wonder that a series of attacks against Kurds occurred during nationwide marches by Idealist Hearths, a group close to the ultranationalist MHP, held Sept. 8 under the slogan “Pay respect to martyrs, condemn terrorism.”
The on-and-off periods of cease-fire and fighting since 1999 seem to have greatly lowered the Turkish majority’s threshold of psychological resistance to violence. Turks have since become less tolerant of PKK attacks. The sudden resumption of bloodshed and the daily funerals of soldiers and police — just as hopes for a peaceful settlement had been raised, leading to a sense of relief that “it’s finally over” — seem to have intensified the trauma. This, in turn, is fanning the hatred.
A failure to immediately stop the violence against Kurds could have two major impacts on the restive community. First, the attacks against the HDP could lead Kurds to lose faith in politics as a means of contributing to the settlement of the conflict. This, in turn, would inevitably strengthen the inclination to use violence as a political tool and stoke separatist sentiment. Second, continued attacks on Kurds, their businesses and buses and a feeling that western Turkey is no longer safe for Kurds and their investments will accelerate psychological estrangement among Kurds, with the result again being a strengthening of separatist sentiment. The sense of estrangement will only grow stronger if Kurds also come to believe that the security forces are not doing enough to protect them.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ori...pkk-clashes-heading-to-turk-kurd-strife.html#
The fierce conflict between the Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the 1990s claimed some 40,000 lives, but it never devolved into a Turkish-Kurdish civil war. Although a number of bloody incidents took place in residential areas of western Turkey where Kurdish minorities lived, they were quickly contained before they could spread.
The first sign that real Turkish-Kurdish strife is possible came in October 2014, during the deadly street protests referred to as the “Kobani unrest.” During Oct. 6-8, Kurds across Turkey took to the streets to protest the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which they held responsible for the siege of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani by the Islamic State (IS). In ethnically mixed, Turkish-majority cities, such as Gaziantep, Turkish crowds confronted the demonstrators. In fact, clashes in Gaziantep claimed four lives. Deaths from the unrest, which spilled over to 35 cities, totaled 50, and thousands of public and residential buildings, businesses, schools and vehicles were vandalized or destroyed.
Since Sept. 8, Turkey has been the scene of nationwide attacks on Kurds that are unprecedented since the PKK took up arms in 1984. The wave of violence erupted after two massive PKK bomb attacks killed 16 soldiers and 14 policemen on Sept. 6 and Sept. 8, respectively, spreading to almost all the provinces outside the Kurdish-majority regions of the southeast. Nationalist groups took to the streets, assaulting Kurdish civilians, Kurdish-owned businesses and offices of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which had emerged as Turkey’s third-largest party in the June 7 elections, winning 13.1% of the vote and 80 seats in the 550-member parliament. The party’s offices in 56 provinces and districts were stoned, vandalized and torched. The attacks reached a peak late Sept. 8 when a mob of some 500 people stormed HDP headquarters in downtown Ankara, ransacking and burning part of the building.
Turkish nationalists, reported to have mobilized via social media, also attacked intercity buses carrying passengers to Kurdish-majority regions. Dozens of buses, singled out according to their license plates or company names, had their windows broken under hails of stones, while others were stopped and their passengers verbally and physically harassed. As a result, bus companies operating between the western regions and Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, canceled services Sept. 9-10 to protest the violence.
Impoverished Kurdish workers struggling to make a living from seasonal agricultural jobs across the country were not spared beatings and harassment. Meanwhile, one of the worst nights of horror unfolded Sept. 8 in the central Anatolian city of Kirsehir, where more than 20 Kurdish-owned businesses and shops, including the city’s only bookstore, were torched. The local HDP office was vandalized, and vehicles bound for the southeast were stoned at the city’s bus terminal. According to witnesses, the assailants, who numbered in the thousands, carried lists of their targets. Kirsehir Gov. Necati Senturk blamed the violence on “provocateurs who mingled into an innocent demonstration to condemn terrorism.”
Indeed, the popular outrage the PKK has triggered by killing 30 members of the security forces in two days has presented provocateurs with a golden opportunity. Luckily, as of Sept. 10, the attacks on businesses and party offices had not resulted in any fatalities, but no doubt this good fortune cannot last forever. The danger of frenzied, gun-wielding Turks and Kurds confronting each other in the streets is very real, as the Kobani protests have already shown.
That said, the risk of an all-out confrontation appears for now to have been averted. HDP parliamentary whip Idris Baluken issued a poignant warning Sept. 9, stressing that simultaneous, organized attacks in dozens of cities cannot be explained as a coincidence. “We are hardly restraining our own base,” he said. “Everyone should well foresee the consequences if the masses confront each other.” Turkey’s Kurds are estimated to number at least 15 million, with half of them living in the country’s predominantly Turkish west. This alone offers a good idea of how bloody an ethnic conflict could be.
HDP offices and election bureaus had been targets of violence in the run-up to the June 7 polls, including the site of two bomb attacks. The HDP and the Kurdish movement in general showed restraint and stayed out of the streets. They maintained such discipline even after a bomb ripped through an HDP rally in Diyarbakir on June 5, killing four people and wounding 50. Kurdish street unrest at the time would have jeopardized the party’s chances of reaching the 10% threshold of votes required to enter parliament.
The HDP again faces the same risk if Kurds respond to provocations and take to the streets, contributing to a climate of all-out conflict ahead of the Nov. 1 snap elections. Failure by the HDP to surpass the vote threshold will very likely mean the AKP’s return to power as a single-party government.
The job of the provocateurs, meanwhile, has become much easier than in the run-up to June 7. The war with the PKK has resumed, triggering a contest for the nationalist vote between the AKP and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which translates into enmity against Kurds in the street. It is no wonder that a series of attacks against Kurds occurred during nationwide marches by Idealist Hearths, a group close to the ultranationalist MHP, held Sept. 8 under the slogan “Pay respect to martyrs, condemn terrorism.”
The on-and-off periods of cease-fire and fighting since 1999 seem to have greatly lowered the Turkish majority’s threshold of psychological resistance to violence. Turks have since become less tolerant of PKK attacks. The sudden resumption of bloodshed and the daily funerals of soldiers and police — just as hopes for a peaceful settlement had been raised, leading to a sense of relief that “it’s finally over” — seem to have intensified the trauma. This, in turn, is fanning the hatred.
A failure to immediately stop the violence against Kurds could have two major impacts on the restive community. First, the attacks against the HDP could lead Kurds to lose faith in politics as a means of contributing to the settlement of the conflict. This, in turn, would inevitably strengthen the inclination to use violence as a political tool and stoke separatist sentiment. Second, continued attacks on Kurds, their businesses and buses and a feeling that western Turkey is no longer safe for Kurds and their investments will accelerate psychological estrangement among Kurds, with the result again being a strengthening of separatist sentiment. The sense of estrangement will only grow stronger if Kurds also come to believe that the security forces are not doing enough to protect them.
It's not only Turkish cities. There have been serious clashes between Turks and Kurds in the city where I live in, here in Germany.
Loads of bad shit still going down. Video doing the rounds allegedly showing Turkish troops dragging the body of a Kurdish man along a road from a truck. Kurds on Twitter going apeshit over it.
how would another full blown escalation look like? Would the Iraqi based kurds support the ones in Turkey?
Time for the Kurds to have their own country
No idea, but I'm afraid we might find out if the HDP fails to make the 10% threshold in the November elections. One major difference from the 80s and 90s is that Kurdish affairs are really interconnected now in a way they weren't back then.
Agreed.
It sounds reasonable... But then you look at where drawing arbitrary lines based on ethnicity or religion has got us in that region and it becomes clear it probably wouldn't actually solve anything
Only that the arbitrary lines that were drawn had nothing to do with ethnicity or religion.
Actually they did. Lines were drawn not to make states on ethnic or sectarian grounds but rather on the basis that there would be ethnic/sectarian conflicts.
So I'm looking at next years Holiday destinations and Turkey is a place I have always loved going to in the past, Is it safe at the moment in the Touristy places Marmaris etc.? Sorry if I sound ignorant with Turkish events
You'll be fine.
Should be fine. They get loads of tourists from all over the world, especially in the usual tourist spots.
The Turkish guy at work says (in pretty bad English) that it's all the work of the president (or whatever) being unable to get a majority so he's stirring shit to swing people his way.
I'd have thought a civil war with Kurdish separatists could be solved by separation, isn't the prospect of religion v the secular in Turkey nastier?
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At least 30 killed, 126 wounded in two blasts in the Turkish capital Ankara
http://www.dnaindia.com/world/repor...rkish-capital-many-casualties-reports-2133324
ISIS attack?
http://www.dnaindia.com/world/repor...rkish-capital-many-casualties-reports-2133324
ISIS attack?
That is absolutely awful. RIP
HDP and AKP blaming each other, AKP media also blaming PKK.
Sigh. Violently murdered for the crime of marching for peace. What is the world coming to?
Death toll up to 86
This is just terrible.
Feckin hell, RIP.
...Sickening news.
Any organisation claimed responsibility yet then?
Turkey. At War. With Itself.
In his famous and much-criticized 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations,” the late Samuel Huntington described Turkey as a “torn country.” For Huntington there is an irreconcilable difference between the Western-style political institutions of the Republic of Turkey and the Islamic cultural and civilizational foundations of Turkish society. It was a controversial assertion in a controversial article, though Turkey’s current prime minister (and political scientist), Ahmet Davutoglu, made a similar claim in his 1984 dissertation. I disagree with both professors. Turkey may not be “torn” in the way that Huntington and Davutoglu believe, but it is tearing itself apart in a war with itself.
The background for Saturday’s horrific bombing is about another seemingly irreconcilable difference, that between Turkish and Kurdish nationalism. Ever since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I on a specifically ethno-nationalist basis that made “Turkishness” a singular attribute of identity, expressions of Kurdish identity have been suppressed, often violently. In return, Kurdish alienation has often been expressed through force. The most recent example is the three-decades-long war between the terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish state. There are, of course, many Kurds who are well integrated in the political, social, and economic life of Turkey. This has considerably less to do with any flexibility or accommodation on the part of the state or the dominant social group—Turks—than an apparent willingness on the part of the Kurds to accommodate themselves to the mainstream culture and negotiate their way in it.
That the conflict between nationalisms is the central drama of Turkish politics does not mean that one could not imagine its resolution. The problem has always been politics and the way that politicians—leftist, rightist, centrist, Islamist, secular, and Kurdish—have leveraged the conflict to advance their own agendas. And so the “Kurdish question” has become a permanent feature of Turkey’s politics. And yet this conflict is only the toxic context for a series of other struggles—some well established, some new—that have contributed to the current moment in which bodies are piling up on Turkish streets at an unprecedented rate (even by the bloody standards of the late 1970s when violence between leftist and rightist political forces wracked the country, killing about 4,500 people). Today, the conflicts roiling Turkish society include:
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opponents would have it that he and the AKP caused Saturday’s violence and the Suruc and Diyarbakir bombings before it. This seems unlikely, though “cause” can be an expansive term. At the very least Erdogan’s political strategy going back to the run up to elections last spring, but actually further back to the local elections of March2014, is a testament to how the combination of unbounded ambition, the political conflicts outlined above, and identity can radicalize a society. No matter who is directly responsible for Saturday’s bombing—the Islamic State, the PKK, or some other group—Kurds, who have overwhelmingly been the victims of these kinds of attacks, have been portrayed as collectively subversive. They are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers who seek to undermine Turkey’s unity. None of this is new, but it has taken on a new urgency especially since the June elections when the legal Kurdish-based party, the HDP, earned 13 percent of the popular vote. This vote total denied the AKP a parliamentary majority and a pathway for Erdogan to force a new constitution that would give him his coveted “executive presidency.” Erdogan’s nationalist gambit and the bloodcurdling rhetoric that has gone with it, which seeks to connect the HDP with the terrorists of the PKK in order to push the former below Turkey’s 10 percent parliamentary threshold, has made Kurds—all Kurds—a target.
The PKK has a role to play in creating an environment of violence. The murder of two police officers while they slept in Sanliurfa on July 22 was reported to be the work of a PKK youth wing only marginally under the control of the organization’s leadership. Be that as it may, the PKK was itching for a fight as the peace process, which began in 2013 between the group and the Turkish government, faltered. Also, the organization’s leadership seems unwilling to countenance the rise of the HDP with is own charismatic leader who is committed to playing by the existing rules of the Turkish political game and has been successful at it. It seems that the AKP, the nationalist hardliners of the MHP, and the PKK have an abiding political interest in cutting the HDP down to size. Needless to say, the cycle of violence Turks and Kurds are currently enduring serve that purpose.
The unfortunate reality is that Turkish society is now made up of mutually distrustful camps. The political sniping between the AKP and the HDP as well as the CHP’s disingenuous call for the resignations of the justice and interior ministers and accountability are little more than preelection posturing that only reinforces the political polarization that is contributing to Turkey’s bloody impasse. Accountability would be welcome and likely advance Turkey’s ever-elusive search for national unity, but the set of conditions necessary for this kind of leadership simply do not currently exist. All of the political incentives for Turkish politicians actually run in the opposite direction, encouraging them to use the deaths of more than a hundred people to delegitimize their opponents and win votes. This does not make Turkish politicians any more craven than politicians elsewhere, but in the context of Turkey’s encounter with Kurdish nationalism and its myriad of related political struggles, the resulting suboptimal outcome is more blood.
I was in Istanbul very briefly last week; about thirty-six hours. I spent part of the time chatting with my Turkish friends about the elections, the war in Syria, and the conflict with the PKK. The profound sense of unease and uncertainty was revealing. No one knew where Turkey was headed after November 1, but it was also clear that the principles and ideals of democratic politics and the importance of Western-inspired political institutions had become embedded in their minds. So much for Huntington. I spent the other part of my time wandering around Kadikoy on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, eating and snapping photos of everyday life, including AKP, CHP, and HDP activists electioneering. It was fun to play tourist for a day and it all seemed so normal, even if there was a war going on in the country. After Saturday, that is the part that is so worrying. The normality of a country at war with itself.
http://blogs.cfr.org/cook/2015/10/12/turkey-at-war-with-itself/
In his famous and much-criticized 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations,” the late Samuel Huntington described Turkey as a “torn country.” For Huntington there is an irreconcilable difference between the Western-style political institutions of the Republic of Turkey and the Islamic cultural and civilizational foundations of Turkish society. It was a controversial assertion in a controversial article, though Turkey’s current prime minister (and political scientist), Ahmet Davutoglu, made a similar claim in his 1984 dissertation. I disagree with both professors. Turkey may not be “torn” in the way that Huntington and Davutoglu believe, but it is tearing itself apart in a war with itself.
The background for Saturday’s horrific bombing is about another seemingly irreconcilable difference, that between Turkish and Kurdish nationalism. Ever since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I on a specifically ethno-nationalist basis that made “Turkishness” a singular attribute of identity, expressions of Kurdish identity have been suppressed, often violently. In return, Kurdish alienation has often been expressed through force. The most recent example is the three-decades-long war between the terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish state. There are, of course, many Kurds who are well integrated in the political, social, and economic life of Turkey. This has considerably less to do with any flexibility or accommodation on the part of the state or the dominant social group—Turks—than an apparent willingness on the part of the Kurds to accommodate themselves to the mainstream culture and negotiate their way in it.
That the conflict between nationalisms is the central drama of Turkish politics does not mean that one could not imagine its resolution. The problem has always been politics and the way that politicians—leftist, rightist, centrist, Islamist, secular, and Kurdish—have leveraged the conflict to advance their own agendas. And so the “Kurdish question” has become a permanent feature of Turkey’s politics. And yet this conflict is only the toxic context for a series of other struggles—some well established, some new—that have contributed to the current moment in which bodies are piling up on Turkish streets at an unprecedented rate (even by the bloody standards of the late 1970s when violence between leftist and rightist political forces wracked the country, killing about 4,500 people). Today, the conflicts roiling Turkish society include:
- The Justice and Development Party (AKP) vs. the Republican People’s Party (CHP);
- The AKP vs. the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP);
- The AKP vs. the People Democratic Party (HDP);
- The AKP vs. the Gulenists;
- The HDP vs. the PKK;
- Everyone vs. the PKK;
- The MHP vs. the HDP;
- Everyone vs. the self-proclaimed Islamic State (though there are persistent questions about the government’s position on this group and other extremists); and
- Alevi Muslims vs. orthodox Sunni Muslims.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opponents would have it that he and the AKP caused Saturday’s violence and the Suruc and Diyarbakir bombings before it. This seems unlikely, though “cause” can be an expansive term. At the very least Erdogan’s political strategy going back to the run up to elections last spring, but actually further back to the local elections of March2014, is a testament to how the combination of unbounded ambition, the political conflicts outlined above, and identity can radicalize a society. No matter who is directly responsible for Saturday’s bombing—the Islamic State, the PKK, or some other group—Kurds, who have overwhelmingly been the victims of these kinds of attacks, have been portrayed as collectively subversive. They are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers who seek to undermine Turkey’s unity. None of this is new, but it has taken on a new urgency especially since the June elections when the legal Kurdish-based party, the HDP, earned 13 percent of the popular vote. This vote total denied the AKP a parliamentary majority and a pathway for Erdogan to force a new constitution that would give him his coveted “executive presidency.” Erdogan’s nationalist gambit and the bloodcurdling rhetoric that has gone with it, which seeks to connect the HDP with the terrorists of the PKK in order to push the former below Turkey’s 10 percent parliamentary threshold, has made Kurds—all Kurds—a target.
The PKK has a role to play in creating an environment of violence. The murder of two police officers while they slept in Sanliurfa on July 22 was reported to be the work of a PKK youth wing only marginally under the control of the organization’s leadership. Be that as it may, the PKK was itching for a fight as the peace process, which began in 2013 between the group and the Turkish government, faltered. Also, the organization’s leadership seems unwilling to countenance the rise of the HDP with is own charismatic leader who is committed to playing by the existing rules of the Turkish political game and has been successful at it. It seems that the AKP, the nationalist hardliners of the MHP, and the PKK have an abiding political interest in cutting the HDP down to size. Needless to say, the cycle of violence Turks and Kurds are currently enduring serve that purpose.
The unfortunate reality is that Turkish society is now made up of mutually distrustful camps. The political sniping between the AKP and the HDP as well as the CHP’s disingenuous call for the resignations of the justice and interior ministers and accountability are little more than preelection posturing that only reinforces the political polarization that is contributing to Turkey’s bloody impasse. Accountability would be welcome and likely advance Turkey’s ever-elusive search for national unity, but the set of conditions necessary for this kind of leadership simply do not currently exist. All of the political incentives for Turkish politicians actually run in the opposite direction, encouraging them to use the deaths of more than a hundred people to delegitimize their opponents and win votes. This does not make Turkish politicians any more craven than politicians elsewhere, but in the context of Turkey’s encounter with Kurdish nationalism and its myriad of related political struggles, the resulting suboptimal outcome is more blood.
I was in Istanbul very briefly last week; about thirty-six hours. I spent part of the time chatting with my Turkish friends about the elections, the war in Syria, and the conflict with the PKK. The profound sense of unease and uncertainty was revealing. No one knew where Turkey was headed after November 1, but it was also clear that the principles and ideals of democratic politics and the importance of Western-inspired political institutions had become embedded in their minds. So much for Huntington. I spent the other part of my time wandering around Kadikoy on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, eating and snapping photos of everyday life, including AKP, CHP, and HDP activists electioneering. It was fun to play tourist for a day and it all seemed so normal, even if there was a war going on in the country. After Saturday, that is the part that is so worrying. The normality of a country at war with itself.
http://blogs.cfr.org/cook/2015/10/12/turkey-at-war-with-itself/